Against Nature
by Esmerelda
Summary: Dawn reflects about a month after 'The Body'.


TITLE: Against Nature  
AUTHOR: Esmerelda  
E-MAIL: animus_liber@hotmail.com  
DISCLAIMER: Look under Whedon, Joss.  
TIMELINE: About a month after 'The Body'.  
SPOILERS: Pretty much all of season 5.  
SYNOPSIS: Dawn thinks. And then she's depressed. And then she thinks some more.  
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Improv #14: hidden - jade - memento - possession  
RATING: PG  
  
  
  
  
  
She leans back against the pristine white tile, temporarily exhausted. Her mouth hurts and her stomach aches. She runs an impersonal, curious hand over the flesh, underneath her pale green sweater, which is too small but her mother picked it out, and so she wears it as a further memento, as if the house, stamped with Joyce's personality, and her sister, burdened with Joyce's responsibilities, weren't enough. No, there has to be more, there has to be a garden Buffy and Dawn would never tend, and videotapes they would never watch, and clothes they would never wear.  
  
Her friends hover at school, worried and kindly concerned and wanting to be there for her but not knowing how to say it. It's okay, because she doesn't want, can't take, their comfort anyway. She watches them whisper and catches them glancing at her sympathetically, sees them wonder where her lunch is and notices them notice her outfits. Sometimes they are Joyce's - sweaters too big and too old for her or blouses too businesslike or skirts too long, and sometimes they're simply dirty and creased. As if she's slept in them, which is ridiculous because Dawn hardly ever sleeps anymore. Just when she really can't avoid it, when she's literally about to drop, then she lies down and closes her eyes; and if she's lucky her mother's face isn't there, and if she's really lucky that face isn't in her dreams either.  
  
But of course, Dawn isn't lucky.  
  
Her stomach is a little distended as Dawn rubs her hand slowly across it, but already she's feeling hungry again. She wonders whether she's left any food in the fridge. It's okay; Buffy will be home soon, and if there isn't she'll go do a shop. Buffy doesn't notice just how quickly the cupboards and fridge empty, just how often she makes a rapid run to the supermarket, she's too preoccupied with being a mother and student and friend and Slayer to worry about something like that.  
  
Too busy worrying about Dawn. Dawn in school, Dawn at home (she rarely goes out voluntarily), Dawn and Dad, Dawn and Glory. She does nothing but think about Dawn.  
  
But, she hardly ever talks to Dawn anymore. She doesn't ask her opinion on anything. She doesn't try to find out how her day was, and now Dawn has stopped trying to find out about hers. She never *sees* her.   
  
Maybe that's because Dawn makes sure she doesn't. She's hidden herself away; retreated, tried to harden her heart because she always thought Buffy would go first (when she thought about it) and she still thinks Buffy will die soon and she doesn't want to feel this numb, this raw, again.  
  
Dawn stares up at the ceiling. It's a very pale cream shade. White walls, cream ceiling, smooth cream tiles on the floor, fake pine details. She remembers being dragged around what felt like hundreds of shops when they were moving in, picking out bathroom sets of towels and toothbrush holder and soap dish, in jade and scarlet and sky blue. Stupid colours for a bathroom, she'd thought, too bright and garish for a room no one pays attention to. Stupid to spend so much time choosing them.  
  
She would happily go on a million dull trips for homely fripperies, if it meant she was with Joyce.  
  
She plays those little games with herself, occasionally. Would she rather... never see her mom again but know she was alive, or have Mom dead?  
  
Would she rather... spend the rest of her life without friends or love, or have Mom dead?  
  
Would she rather... her mom was a vampire, or have Mom dead?  
  
Would she rather... have never existed, or have Mom dead?  
  
The last is easy. They're all easy; Dawn would do anything to have Joyce back again. But the last, particularly so, even particularly right. Giving up her own life doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice, given what her life is. Lonely, hunted, barely there in the first place.  
  
She thinks about when she first discovered what she was, and what she wasn't. Isn't. Remembers the knife in her hand, without her knowing how it got there, and the grim exultation of drawing it across her delicate skin, watching the blood appear in a thin, slowly dripping crimson line, not feeling any pain.  
  
She wonders if there'd be any pain now, when all the pain she can take is centred in her heart. Sometimes she wants that sensation - yearns for it - but she suppresses the urge, though she's not sure how long she'll be able to do that for.  
  
She doesn't want to do *that*. She doesn't want to be crazy.  
  
She's crazy enough. Crazy, but not stupid; she's read the patronisingly warning teen magazines, listened in Health class. What she's doing now isn't about her looks, or her body, or her blood, it's about her feelings. She's trying to create order in a universe, a life, where she feels powerless.  
  
Where she is powerless, and so though she's aware what she's doing is damaging and not normal and spiralling out of control, she doesn't care. Does it anyway, for the brief assertion of control.  
  
Buffy keeps stuff from her. Now she keeps stuff from Buffy, guarding it jealously like some prized possession. She feels like what's in contention is *her*. She wants Buffy to notice what's wrong without having to tell her. Without having to admit to anything.  
  
She wants to be coddled and get sympathy and soup and hugs like when she was little and got sick. She suspects if she got sick, little if any would be forthcoming. It's not something she blames Buffy for.  
  
She kind of blames God, even though she's decided He doesn't exist. Their family has never been terribly devout - church at Christmas and Easter in LA, not at all in Sunnydale, where her mom didn't bother to get them in a parish. Not religious. She prays sometimes, long streams of babbling venom and hatred and blinding confusion at whatever might be listening to her, but still prayer, right?  
  
Nothing's answered her, anyway. She tells herself there's nothing in it - religion - but she can't help hoping that maybe, somehow, she'll find faith, or it'll find her, and everything will be magically made... not okay. But better.  
  
That, or that she'll be struck down. Whether it's for damning God in her thoughts and talk or for being an unnatural being, she doesn't really care.  
  
Is she a sin against nature? Glory told her the Key could be - she could be evil. Could be good. Is she meant to decide for herself? Or is she meant to wait passively while battles are fought around and over her, and submit to the eventual winner?  
  
When someone wins, if someone wins, Dawn isn't counting on it being Buffy. Naturally no one's talking to her about it, this thing that will be a major factor in the rest of her life (such as her having a rest of her life), but she hears Buffy come in later every night from researching with Giles and now and again she comes in and locks herself in her room and the next morning there's a fading bruise somewhere on her. Dawn sees Giles cast her worried glances, and Tara and Willow looking drawn and exhausted from spell after spell - warn us of Glory, keep Glory out, weaken Glory, protect Dawn.  
  
And yet there's no protection for Dawn of the thing that scares her most - herself. Her thoughts. She used to be balanced and pretty happy, for a teenager. (She's actually started writing crappy teenage-angst poetry, with more reason than other teenagers, but she never gets further than a few lines before she's scribbling it all out with furious, hard marks of thick black ink).  
  
Not a thought of suicide, not seriously, like a lot of the girls at school, but now she's scared she'll just do it, without realising she's going to - that she'll be walking along and suddenly, independently of her mind, her body will throw itself under a passing car.  
  
She's terrified that it *won't* be independently of her mind. She's got an idea that death will be peaceful. She might even see her mom. Except she's a blob of energy, and blobs probably don't get to have an afterlife with their fake mothers and clouds and green fields and choirs of angels. Her death might even be what Glory needs, and then everything would be gone to hell, and Dawn wouldn't be able to live with herself then. But she wouldn't have to, because she'd be used up, or changed because energy can't be used up, only switch forms, and thinking like that gives her a headache.  
  
Is this a taste of Slayerhood? She's sorry for all the time she's thought Buffy had it easy.  
  
She thinks Buffy does have it easier in this situation. Not in terms of things to do, things that have to be done, but in terms of things to feel. Buffy can feel sad. She can sob over memories or rejoice in them, because they're real, they're hers.  
  
Fourteen years of Dawn's memories of maternal hugs when she cried and reproaches when she was naughty, of presents at birthdays and Christmases, of arguments and reconciliations, of dinners and breakfasts and school projects and holidays - of *life* - are of nothing. Adapted snippets of the monks' early lives, perhaps. Things they wanted from their childhoods, or simply envisaged for a girl's.  
  
But nothing of her.  
  
Nothing but false memories and false knowledge and false feelings that have all come to feel real.  
  
She knows that Saturday night is takeaway night, and that though they always have Chinese, she would prefer Indian.  
  
She knows that when she was younger she had three years of piano lessons, but always wanted to learn the flute. She examines her hands for a moment, wonders if she could still play like she remembers, with these fingers that have never touched the keys of a piano.  
  
She knows that she loves her mother and her sister.  
  
And that she hates herself. 


End file.
